Merry Christmas!

Last night, because of the blizzard church was canceled, my mom had her own service.  The only problem was that our family isn't very musically inclined so when it came to the carols part we couldn't stop laughing at how bad we sounded.  Boomer was very agitated by the noise we were all making. 

 Today the roads were still very bad around where I am so no one left the house.  We opened presents in the morning and then had Christmas dinner around 3 PM.  My brother mostly received items that he would need to set up house when he moves out, which should be soon.  My loot included:

• 14" Emerilware Cast Iron Wok
• Pampered Chef Pizza Stone
• Bamboo cooking utensils
• Bamboo coaster set
  
• Bamboo napkin holder
• Bamboo letter organzer
• Bamboo cutting boards
• Bamboo lazy Susan w/ salt & pepper shakers and oil & vinegar bottles
• Fondue set
• Idiot's Guide to Fondue
• Decanter and glasses set
• Kitchen scissors
• 1001 Chocolate recipies
• Gift cards
• Blanket
• Long underwear

My only concern is being able to fit all of my new things into my car when I return to South Bend.  Christmas movies have been playing almost constantly and food is plenty.  Merry Christmas everyone!

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

So classes ended about two weeks ago. The GSDO held a bowling night and Nick, Anne, Michael and myself all attended. As usual, I did a very poor job, but since no one else was amazingly great on our lane, I didn't look too bad.

Finals were last week and boy were they rough. I spent many hours studying for my math final only to walk into the test and find that two of the questions were taken from the last day of notes which we never had homework over and so I figured they would not be that heavily used. Also given that there were 430 pages of notes for the course, there were a couple other questions on the test that I couldn't remember the necessary information for. Normally, this would not have been a problem, but the test was only 7 questions long, and if you have been keeping track, I didn't know how to do at least 4 of them. I did pass the class with a B- and will have to pass the qualifier in the spring, but I will make sure I am ready for it by them. That evening, Nick came over for Jello shots and margaritas while we watched Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. The next afternoon Michael and I started the long drive to Oklahoma City. We arrived at 4 AM the next day. The trip wasn't too bad, we just traded driving shifts until we arrived.

On Sunday, we went back to the Christmas tree farm to cut down the tree we had picked out. When we got there, we found that someone had taken our tag and marking ribbon and moved them to a different tree so they could take ours. We had to walk through the farm again to find another tree, a very hard task since all the trees that were big enough seemed to have major problems, like an uneven distribution of branches or a crooked trunk, but we eventually found one and it is now in our family room decorated.

I hope my mom enjoys Christmas since she got two of her wishes. First, she has always wanted the tree in the family room so she could enjoy it more. Secondly, she wants to be snowed in for Christmas, and with the current blizzard warning that lasts until 10 PM tonight there is a good chance of her getting that.

Snow!!!

Today I woke up to a call from Michael saying that Anne and I needed to be careful when driving. I just assumed that there had been some sleet the night before, but when I walked outside it was white.

Unfortunately, the snow had melted by then end of the day but, not to worry, more is predicted for the rest of the week, in addition to dropping temperatures.

It is November and the weather is taunting me...

Disclaimer: I started this post back in Mid-November and then I never got around to finishing it, but I decided to keep the title and just write one big post about the last month.

Back in early October I frantically went shopping for a good winter coat because the weather had been cold and wet, but now it is November and it is 60 degrees and sunny. Sadly, I cannot enjoy this beautiful weather because my classes and research are keeping me very busy.

Not only has November been busy but it has also been a rather rough month in my personal life. On Nov. 10th, my ferret, Cookie, crawled into my wall and disappeared. I spent the whole week trying to figure out ways to get into the wall and find her. I was so frantic I almost started tearing down my shower wall. Michael tried to find either an exterminator or plumber to come stick a bore scope down the hole, but they were both too expensive and too short. Finally, after checking with all my neighbors, we said goodbye. In order to take my mind off missing Cookie and to keep Nova company, Michael bought me Pandora that weekend. She is very different from both Cookie and Nova because she like to bite and hang on. I am working on breaking that habit as fast as I can.

I also have been dealing with pain in my side since March. I started visiting a gastroenterologist here and the first thing he did was schedule me for a colonoscopy. I do not look forward to the time in my life when I have to do that once a year. That is all the detail you need. They didn't find anything so I still don't know why I keep having this pain.

The next week I went home for Thanksgiving. It was so nice to be home, espcially because it was a beautiful sunny 60 degrees back in Oklahoma. I also went with my parents and MK to pick out a Christmas tree, a ritual we usually do when it is freezing outside. On Black Friday, I purchased a Blu-Ray player which also streams Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube. The Blu-Ray Star Trek DVD that I purchased unfortunately got left at home so I have yet to actually see the amazing HD picture that this thing should put out.


Now I am back in South Bend and it is cold but there is still no snow. Houston got snow before us. Something about that doesn't seem right, but I hope that the weather is still nice in OK when I go back for Christmas. I have a feeling I will get enough winter weather up here that I won't need any extra at Christmas.

That's all for now, but I am sure there will be much more to say as the Christmas season continues.

Fall Break is over and already I am counting down the days until Winter Break

Fall break was way too short, although that may have been due to the fact that the first half was spent battling severe allergies and someone with the flu (*cough*MK*cough*). That actually probably isn't too far off from how I sound in real life anyway. I have been stuck with a very persistent cough for the last couple of weeks that I also blame on allergies. On the plus side, I did get lots of sleep (doesn't feel like it this week) and made actual physical progress on my research. While purchasing the supplies necessary to build my flow loop, the guy at Lowes who help my undergraduate assistant and me mistook us for "Mama bear and Papa bear buying supplies for a science project." I didn't know I looked old enough for someone to think I had kids old enough to be building science fair projects. I very politely told him that the young man beside me was my research assistant and that we were building a flow loop to do a PIV study of flow through the aortic valve. Also on a research related note, I have been working on writing my NSF proposal and hopefully when it is finished I can post a version of it here so everyone can see all the cool work I will be doing over the next few years. Also, maybe by the time certain friends make it out of med school there might even be a new medical tool in use by cardiac surgeons that I will have had a hand in creating, but more on that in another post.

On Friday I went to the Lighthouse Place in Michigan City with MK. It is an outdoor outlet center with stores from the likes of Burberry, Yankee Candle, Le Gourmet Chef, Correlle, Harry & David, etc. I was hoping I might find a good deal on a bag from Burberry, but I just found grossly overpriced items such as a pair of ear muffs at the wonderfully reduced price of $99. It was a grey day, but we went to the beach anyway. It was neat to walk along a deserted beach and listen to the waves even if it was bit on the chilly side.

On Monday, Nova went in for her rabies vaccination. Cookie had come along for the ride and seemed to be having fun trying to get into everything in the vet's office. She even pulled up the menu to add observing vet students to Nova's appointment and locked it on that screen so that the nurse had to restart the computer. Nova was not having fun. She walked around for a bit, but then came over and stared hiding in the sweater I was wearing until I forced her to come out. During her temperature reading, she showed her discontent by peeing on the nurse. She didn't actually make noise or jump like Cookie does when the actual injection was done. She needs to go back for her distemper shot in a few weeks.

Homesick for Tulsa

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that I choose Notre Dame, but there are many things that are taking time getting used to.  I was walking from my office, located at the very north tip of campus, to my class on the opposite side and I started to feel rather lonely.  I am so used to a small campus where not only is the walk across very short, but I also could see many familiar faces along the way.  I miss walking into a building and at least recognizing most of the people.  I miss having people to chat, eat, and study with.  Lately I have been so busy that I don't have time to get to know people, and I am sure most other people are experiencing the same thing.  It is also painfully obvious how few girls there are in engineering.  According to the TU website, 29% of the graduate students are female in the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences.  On the ND website 38% of all graduate students for the entire university are female.  There were probably about 30 new students added to the AME department this year and I think only 3-4 are girls, which means that for my year it is about 10% female.  At Tulsa even though girls were still the minority, there were plenty around to talk to when I just wanted to have girl talk.  

The academic culture is very different.  At TU, I enjoyed knowing all my professors and feeling that they truly cared about my success even though I was a mere undergrad.  Here, it is very apparent that the professors are more here for their research and graduate students.  Even though they are here for the grad students, some of them still manage to be less accessible to me that any of my professors at TU.

On the plus side, next week is fall break and I will finally be able to make some progress on my research.  I will be going hardware shopping with my undergraduate research assistant, Andrew.  I really hope one of the store employees asks me what project I am working on so I can watch their face when I say that I am building an artificial heart using their plumbing department.  I plan to have fun because this part of the research is full of problem solving and requires some creative uses of different components.

It has been a busy while....

I have been feeling very guilty because I started this blog and then promptly seemed to forget about it. I did not forget about it, but graduate school has been remarkably busy to the point where if I had tried writing anything it would have been a bunch of gibberish. So now for a brief catch up.

Classes have been going well. There was a spell where my Continuum Mechanics professor was giving us a homework assignment every class period. Fluids has been reasonable. The homework has become much less of a burden since Nick and I started working together. Math Methods is just wrong. I had my first test and it covered multi-variable calculus, ordinary differential equations, linear differential equations, and series/perturbation solution methods. Meanwhile my research is progressing slowly. I now know what I need to do, but the hard part will be actually constructing my flow loop. I have an undergraduate Andrew who will be my research assistant. I won't go too much into my work and save that for another blog after I have some cool pictures.

I have not been attending the football games, but I have been exploring the surrounding Indiana countryside. One weekend was spent going to a rock and mineral show as well as Shipshewana, a very commercialized Amish community. Buggy rides only $7! Another weekend was spent attending the Marshmallow Festival in Ligonier. It was a nice festival with a classic car show including a display from a local towing company.

I also have been to the Indiana National Dunes where I attended the Harvest festival and climbed Mt. Baldy. The 128 ft climb was excruciating. The hardest part is that at that angle every step results in some of the sand sliding back down so you end up having to take two to three steps very rapidly just to cover the distance one step on normal ground would cover.

The weather lately has been bouncing all over the place, but lately it has become very dreary and rather chilly. I am finally starting to take getting ready for winter seriously.

The Second Day

It has been overcast for most of the time I have been here in South Bend, and today was no exception. As I was walking past Touchdown Jesus to my office in the drizzle, I spied two people in long black robes walking across the quad. My first reaction was "Dude, Notre Dame has some hardcore Harry Potter fans!", but then I realized they were just a couple of priests. I am still getting acclimated to the number of clergy on campus.

I had Mathematical Methods and Intermediate Fluid Mechanics today. Math Methods is going to be covering all the advanced math principles that we will need to do our graduate level work. However, quite a bit of what will be covered in the class has already been introduced to me in Quantum Mechanics. I can't say that I understand it, but at least it will be somewhat familiar. I also get to use Mathematica again. Yipee! I thought I had escaped that torture device, but today I installed it on my laptop. Fluid mechanics also startled me a bit because much of what we will be covering seems to be things I have already been introduced to in various courses at the University of Tulsa. So thanks to all my professors at TU for setting me up to be a competitive grad student.

I also attended the first 15 minutes of Intermediate Thermodynamics, the class which I am TAing. Out of the six students registered, four of them showed up today. There are two TAs. I am so grateful that I don't have to grade homework for a class of 70 this semester.

The professors here also require us to use a format called LATEX when creating technical documents. It is a text based program, and I have to wonder if there is not a slightly more user friendly and newer alternative in use.

The First Day...and a little bit more.

So today was the official start of the school year at Notre Dame and the start of my graduate studies. I am pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in the area of biofluidics under the watchful eye of Dr. Philippe Sucosky. My very first official graduate class was Continuum Mechanics with Dr. Paolucci. I always find it interesting when professors start off a class by telling you that everything you will spend hours trying to learn in the coming semester is completely made up.

I also had my first meeting with my research group. This semester, I will be building a flow loop to recreate the blood flow through the aorta. I am also in charge of making sure that our lab meets safety requirements for the Class IV laser which I will be using to do a PIV study to determine the mechanism behind the calcification of the aorta.

This evening I attended the welcome picnic next to the library with MK. I was surprised at how fast they were able to get several thousand students through the buffet-style dinner. However, we learned the hard way that it is very important to make sure you remember exactly where you are parked. MK and I spend a good 10 minutes walking around pressing the lock button on the key fob only to figure out that we were one lot over from where we had left the car.

All in all, it was a good first day. I hope to put up some pictures of where I work and live soon.